hell is empty, all the devils are here
by ten.years.only.with.you
Summary: For such a long time spent on the earth, the chances of meeting a lady were slim, until now. klaroline


_Hell is the empty / the devils are all here._

x

A thousand years in ruin, and he still hasn't learned a damn thing about love. There are more important things than diamond bracelets wretched from royalty and big words spit with what little sincerity isn't taken over by bloodlust. He feels like a child in her presence, and he ruefully remembers the day that his mother, ahem—Esther, slit their throats, drained their bodies, and hung them out like laundry in the breeze.

He was a simple seventeen. And for a thousand years, he has yet to be anything but that.

x

The first flash of blonde curls whip around her face, slowing in warped speed from her vamped out running and all he can see is how blue her eyes are like the seas of Europe and his muddled palette of watercolors; how her grin is so huge that it almost takes up her entire face and swallows it whole; how her skin looks like the soft flesh of a ripe peach, begging to ripped open and feasted upon; and all the while, she cowers under the covers of a scratchy blanket asking for death and wishing the end so she doesn't have to deign herself to ask for his help.

It's half of the intention he saves her. She should be so very terrified that he will drive wooden bullets through her heart splinter by splinter, and yet, she looks him fiercely in the black pools of his centuries seen orbs and asks for salvation, but not at his hands.

[He never reasons the other half.]

x

Klaus has walked this miserable planet for what seems like ever sometimes and other times it feels like he is just catching up. He's encountered more bimbos, beauties, foxes, whores, sluts, sirens, and goddesses than most men ever hope to lay eyes upon in a lifetime; however, he's not chanced an actual lady until he meets Caroline Forbes. Sometimes he curses the day he met her because now he goes to sleep (thrashing in his sheets) each night knowing she is out there, taunting him with what he cannot be privileged enough to have.

x

Over drinks and daggers, Bekah tells him that humans have a knack for choosing the things that are precisely the worst for them. He tells her to fuck off, drains his scotch, and breaks her neck twice for good measure because Klaus may have his weaknesses, few and far between, but so help him, he never has been and never will be something as disgusting and wrecked as a human.

x

Esther calls his bluff when she yanks his chin close to her face so that he knows she can feel his three day old whiskers and asks who is accompanying him to the ball that evening. Like someone of Niklaus Mikaelson's stature is going to condescend to spend any time at all with a baby vamp or even worse and more despicable, a human. His blind thoughts flit to a blonde bombshell with fire in her eyes and venom in her tulip pink pout and legs that carry swift like a ceasing southern hurricane whirl.

Bashfully ducking his head, he whispers, "Oh stop" before planting a cornflower blue organza gown that would shame her sky lit orbs on her white eyelet [precious, innocent] blankets, leaving the ghost of the scent of whiskey, mahogany, and caramel in his wake.

x

He never sees her face when she opens the box.

He never sees her face when she slashes the paper on his letter.

He wishes he had because the look of disdain on her face when she saunters in the ballroom, greyed silk gloves suckling greedily at her elbows and his bracelet teething on her wrist, curls knotted in a spaghetti mess of gold atop her head and a faltering smirk on her mouth is enough to knock him to his knees and wonder how in the fuck he became Damon Salvatore to her Elena Gilbert.

It's bloody _pathetic_. (And he'd dagger himself if he didn't have other plans in the works, just to wipe that moment from his memory. After all he's going to recall that for the rest of his miserable, god forsaken shit of existence.)

x

She grants him a dance. Just one. A single twirl around the room with her dress flushing the pant of his legs and her fingers grasped hotly on the blade of his shoulder. Disregarding how simply he finds the swoop of her waist or how her lip twitches upward when he makes a flimsy retort and she bites back with sarcasm, the music screams loud, deafening to his own ears as she leans in and whispers something in his ear, warm pipes of breath on his face. A comment about being Miss Mystic Falls. Normally he'd snap a bit about petty and precocious and downright ridiculous, but the way her eyebrows are etched into her forehead and the sharp curvature of her lips almost a delicate sneer makes him think twice.

"I know," he states without conviction and is rewarded with a dazzling smile.

x

Like a small boy, he follows her around, hands lightly grazing the last bottom folds of her dress. He claims that he will take her anywhere she wants, rattling off a laundry list of locations and locales that hint a glimmer of hope into her eyes. Unimpressed he moves forward, grinning in delight when she revokes his words with her nasty little tongue. He tells her tales of his paintings and drawings and for just a ghost of a minute does he notice her soften. Klaus' love, the only one that ever wanted him back, was smeared across Europe, spat across Asia, and swept over South America. Unwritten in the words he'd never be [hu]man enough to utter as his fingers danced and dived into charcoal and oil paints and chalky pencil tips, not yet been shared with anyone that mattered. Peasants of the planet over the centuries had never understood the breathtaking lovely of what he made, and he had never once wanted to prove his worth until this girl of seventeen years. Strong, beautiful, full of light. All art is meant to be enjoyed now, love.

x

"Why did you ask me to come here?"

"I fancy you."

Truth be known, he has never been one for liars. And for Christ sake, he's a thousand years old so he can confess to a girl [because that's all she is, he tells himself] how he thinks of her. The smug sting in her closed mouth makes him believe otherwise.

x

Like a scorned lover, Klaus drops his sentiments and flees. Tail between his legs and hatred in his eyes, drunk on raspberry champagne, he scratches charcoal against parchment, snatching lines of her face upon the page, more vinegar and venom with each passing swipe as her eyes bore down upon his. Even in fiction, he cannot feel her near to him.

A thief in the night he slips the sonnets on her windowsill and the irony of a Shakespeare-esque plot doesn't escape his mind. He thanks her for her honesty, cards on the table, and loosens the knot on his tie as he begins his journey home. Being a thousand years old has its benefits, renewed patience for one.

x

The next time he lays eyes on her, the gold curls are a wreck upon her tantalizingly naked collarbone, cornflower eyes wracked with mischief, and an all knowing grin perches on her tulip pink mouth. His adam's apple bobs dangerously in his throat, tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, and Kol is smirking like an asshole as he watches in glee as the biggest, baddest, mother fucker to walk the earth surrenders to Caroline Forbes in her hooker boots and painted on skinny jeans.

Flat out rejecting his advances, he chases after her, a twinge of shame clouding his vision as she struts forward across the street, her hair bright in the deep inky night. It occurs to him after a moment that he is, literally, stalking her, so much so that he almost gets clipped by a moving vehicle, and yet after a thousand years, he doesn't think he's ever seen a better view than watching her saunter off.

"Get to know me," he challenges, extending a palm over the empty bench and the deserted evening sky, a flicker of a half smile shifting on his face. Whether or not she's placating him, sighs and all, she sits and that is something in itself.

x

It's a glitch in the system, a change in the weather as he clutches his chest. The blonde standing before him triumph in her gaze, and all of a sudden he is _so_ **fucking** _**pissed**_. Tricked and bewildered by two nit wits and a one dimensioned doppelganger and a woman that makes him feel emasculated and dumfounded and weak and so fucking simply seventeen. Threats die on his mouth as he steps forward, encroaching her space willing anger to pounce and rip her finely lined caricature to meaningless shreds. His fingers find her, shaking and raking every last golden curl tumbling down her naked collarbone, muddled blue watercolors in her eyes, and a pink tulip stained on her lip.

She doesn't smile anymore.

x

Moping and sulking and pouring leaves of paper into the licking fireplace seems like a good of plan as any, leaning upon the mantle, brooding in the eyes and bloodlust in the veins, coursing through, pumping consistently as it had never left, rather been overridden by something more foolish, more ungracious, more human. It brings a foul writhe to his gut to think that he was ever capable of something _that _tasteless and vulgar as feelings. He broke that switch long ago.

The lines are stained in blood on his tongue of what he would say to her if he had the opportunity to do so. They are not proud words that he wants to say aloud, not things he would ever repeat, not sentences that would be easy for him to create, and yet, there is no way for release.

x

He knows that Finn is in Europe. London to be exact. And he goes to retrieve his soulless mutant of a brother, but not without any detour.

Paris is gorgeous this time of year, he wants to tell her in the postcard. I found my painting he scripts in messy scrawl, inky smearing against the back of his hands. He writes about the crepes and the Eiffel Tower and the Champs Elysses and the absinthe shots. Dropping it in the postbox is an afterthought when he gets back to Mystic Falls a week or so later.

x

He never sees her face when she opens her mailbox.

He never sees her face when she reads the postcard.

But the next day he sees her out in town, gold curls wrapped in messy circles on her head, water colored eyes effervescent, tulip pink lips curved into a quarter moon of a grin, she raises her fingers in a gentle waves, crinkling in the spring breeze, diamonds of decades past catching the sunlight long enough to know that maybe, after all, he could have something good to look forward to in his god forsaken miserable shit of an existence.


End file.
